


Between Two Families

by matrixrefugee



Category: The Fox Woman - Kij Johnson
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-10-15 22:17:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17537330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matrixrefugee/pseuds/matrixrefugee
Summary: The final parting thoughts of two lovers not meant to be...





	Between Two Families

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?user=flash_fanworks)[flash_fanworks](https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?user=flash_fanworks)'s "family". Set just after the ending. Past Yoshifuji/Kitsune, present (if strained) Yoshifuji/Shikujo.

_Shikujo's Pillow Book_

_**The New Year's Moonlight** :_

_The New Year's Moonlight shone bright on the gardens, lighting the sleeping plants and the patches of snow that linger on the ground beyond the paths, like memories that linger from the past._

_My husband lingers on the paths, as if to watch the moonlight, an old man now, alone with his thoughts._

_But the light does not come from the sky, rather, from the ground, from a white sphere like a ball of fox-fire. Has the fox-man left it there for me, or has the fox who bewitched my husband left it behind. I see my husband stir, his robes rustling in the winter stillness, as if he might approach it. I step out from behind the screen that hides me, but I pause, turn, pulling back behind the curtain, behind its shelter._

_Is that why he let himself be bewitched by the fox-woman? is that why he took her to wife? Because she came to him, she did not hide behind a screen? Because she let herself be seen? Have a brought too much of the court with me to this place when I should have let the country shape me as it shaped my husband?_

_A rustle on the path and then his step upon the veranda. "The cold is no good for an old man's bones," he says._

_I step out from behind the screen again. "Let me warm them, husband," I say, and he walks with me to my wing..._

__The Notebook of Kaya no Yoshifuji_ _

_A white sphere rests on the path at some paces from me. Has the moon somehow fallen from the sky, or has my fox-wife left it there for me, this trinket that she carried in her hands? Shall I take it up? Or shall I leave it behind._

_I gaze on it, but not for long, not gazing into its depths, lest it enchant me. The time for enchantments has passed, I have wasted too many years on them, losing fifteen years while as many weeks passed for my wife, my Shikujo._

_I shift my weight, my legs aching in the cold of the winter night. My gaze turns toward the evergreens at the edge of the garden; the fox who left this sphere, who lead me to her sumptuous home and gave me a son, no doubt watches me from there. If I see a young fox in the spring, will it be her offspring?_

_I bow my head toward the junipers and turn away, turn back to my house, where my wife, who gave me a true son and heir, waits for me, stepping out from behind the screens that hide her, then slipping behind them, like a fox slipping into the bracken. My place is by her side, under a roof made by human hands, not a den disguised through fox magic to look like a nobleman's house. My son, my Tadamaro, needs a father to teach him to live as a man; I wonder how I shall succeed, since I have not done so well in living thus. May he never make the mistakes that I have made, and may he learn from his father's errors._

__Kitsune's Diary_ _

I watched from the undergrowth, the evergreens that fringe the gardens of my husband's house, I watched to see what he decided, if he took up the sphere or if he turned aside from it.

He took a step, as if he might come toward me, then he bowed his head and turned back to his house, his human house, the gravel crunching beneath his feet, his footsteps fading as he withdraws, returning to his home and his family, his true wife and his true son.

He has made his choice, he chose his human wife, his human son. I withdrew, slinking away into the brush, into the forest, back to the den I had scraped out and made into a home for him, my human husband.

I wonder if the house, now shrunk to a handful of rooms, will turn back into a den by the morning. Will my maid vanish with the last of my finery? Will my son become a young kit, growing through the winter like his mother and her brother?

I find I cannot slip back into my human shape, even before I reach my house...  



End file.
